Manufacturing a Menace

Manufacturing a Menace

In their latest Foreign Affairs essay, National Security Council official Kurt Campbell and State Department China policy director Rush Doshi argue that the United States is underestimating the strategic threat posed by the People’s Republic of China and must build a vast, integrated coalition to confront it. They present an image of an ascendant, industrially and technologically superior China, one capable of overwhelming the United States unless Washington retools its alliances into a cohesive, scaled-up security and economic bloc. It is, in many ways, a polished version of the same...

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The Kashmir Powder Keg

The Kashmir Powder Keg

On April 22, 2025, militants opened fire near the Pahalgam area of Indian-administered Kashmir, killing twenty-six people—mostly Indian tourists. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in the region in over two decades. Within hours, New Delhi accused Pakistan of harboring the perpetrators, claiming they were linked to Pakistan-based groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba operating under the umbrella of a shadowy group called the “Kashmir Resistance.” Pakistan swiftly denied any involvement. But denials did little to stop the spiraling fallout. India has since suspended the Indus Waters Treaty,...

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Let Colleges Fail!

Let Colleges Fail!

In Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education, Richard K. Vedder delivers a timely, incisive, and much-needed diagnosis of America’s bloated and increasingly dysfunctional university system. Published by the Independent Institute, Vedder’s work is a clarion call to allow free-market forces, especially the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction, to cleanse and renew higher education. For libertarians and Austrians alike, it is not merely a book to be read; it is a pragmatic plan for intellectual and institutional renewal. Vedder, a distinguished economist...

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A Federal Reserve Unbound

A Federal Reserve Unbound

For more than three decades, the Federal Reserve has steadily expanded its role in the American economy. From a relatively narrow mandate as a lender of last resort to commercial banks, to inflation and employment targeting, it now operates as a systemic backstop for entire financial markets, allocating credit, supporting asset prices, and shaping macroeconomic policy in ways few Americans fully understand. While defenders of the Fed frame these developments as pragmatic responses to crises, a broader historical lens, especially Robert Higgs’s “Ratchet Effect” theory, suggests a more...

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Mises and Rothbard Understood the National Debt

Mises and Rothbard Understood the National Debt

As the U.S. Congress continues to ignore the need for real fiscal discipline, kicking the can down the road again with yet another continuing resolution (CR), it is worth revisiting what two of the greats of the Austrian School had to say regarding the question of the national debt. Drawing on the writings of both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, one finds the case against the national debt rests on economic, moral, and political arguments. Mises and Rothbard emphasize that government borrowing is a form of intervention that distorts the natural allocation of capital. In Human Action,...

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Trump’s Tariffs Are Economic Folly, Top to Bottom

Trump’s Tariffs Are Economic Folly, Top to Bottom

On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden to declare “Liberation Day”—a sweeping new tariff initiative aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit and revitalizing domestic manufacturing. The policy introduces a 10% blanket tariff on all imports starting April 5, followed by a second wave of “reciprocal tariffs” targeting sixty countries as of April 9. These include China (34%), the European Union (20%), Taiwan (32%), and South Korea (25%). Canada and Mexico are exempt from the second wave, but existing tariffs on autos and steel remain in place. The White...

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The Imperial Presidency Long Predates Donald Trump

The Imperial Presidency Long Predates Donald Trump

In his defense of the proposed Constitution, James Madison warned in Federalist No. 47 that the accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Elsewhere, he observed that of the three branches, the executive was the one most to be feared, as it concentrated power in a single individual. And in Federalist No. 8, he presciently noted that war “is the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” With the United States functionally at war for more than two decades—against terrorism, against drugs, against...

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Even Realists Overstate the ‘China Threat’

Even Realists Overstate the ‘China Threat’

Perusing the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs, which was typically dreadful, one piece caught my eye. In “The Taiwan Fixation,” Stephen Wertheim and Jennifer Kavanagh argued that a full-scale U.S. military intervention over Taiwan would be catastrophic, and that Washington should seek to balance building up Taiwan’s defense while insulating its own broader Indo-Pacific strategy from Taipei’s fate. Their critique of full-blown interventionism is, of course, well-founded, and was a welcome sight, but their core assumptions remain unfortunately rooted in the flawed logic of American...

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